I am a lady who likes to be in motion. You can send me pretty much anywhere on just a few days’ notice—the farther, the better. Last year, I sailed along the Java Sea in Indonesia and saw komodo dragons; the year before that I crossed a five-city visit to India and a long weekend in Istanbul off my list. I took all of those trips by myself. New places and people energize me. I like to drive, I don’t get nervous on planes, I am a wizard with trains. Another fact of which I’m inexplicably proud: I don’t get seasick.

Yet between 2011 and 2014, the only travel I did was between New York and Washington, D.C. on Amtrak’s northeast corridor, roughly every three weeks or so.

My dad was wasting from Alzheimer’s and I was coming home to be with my family, who live in Northern Virginia. If you know much about the illness, it’s a prolonged, torturous one that devastates the person who has it—right along with everyone who loves them. I often sum it up by saying that he was sick for a long time, and then he was dying for a long time. It’s hard to quantify the toll that takes on the people who are left in its sweeping aftermath. But if you’ve ever loved someone that much and knew you were about to lose them, I’d wager you’d chuck whatever you needed in order to see them as much as you could. For me, it was travel—and, I later realized, the grounding perspective that different people and experiences impart on you, if you’re open to it.

For the first time in more than a year, instead of losing something, I had the chance to get something back

The year I lost my dad was breathtaking in its damage. We got the word he was going on hospice care in January of 2013, just after the holidays. He died six weeks later, in mid-February. That summer, I had my heart broken by a guy I’d been dating. By November, the magazine where I worked announced it was folding and that our entire staff would be out of a job just in time for Christmas. Truly, a fitting bookend to the year.

I started 2014 at a previously unknown low. I was grieving, my confidence was in the trash, and being unemployed brought an element of stress and panic that left me emotionally paralyzed. I was later told this period often is categorized as “survival mode,” and even though that phrase still falls short to me somehow, I suppose it’s correct. I went through the motions of carrying on: I freelanced to make ends meet; I applied and interviewed for positions I consistently wasn’t offered; I worked out regularly. At least this is what my planner from that year tells me. I just remember feeling tired.

Then, during a snowy February when I’d been shut in my apartment for too long, scrolling Twitter, something caught my eye. Pam Houston, one of my favorite writers, was holding a writer’s workshop that fall in Maine. In lieu of a college campus or similar setting, the whole thing was taking place on an 18th-century windjammer, a traditional sailing boat, as it made its way around Penobscot Bay. It was a fairly straightforward workshop—lessons on craft, with the option to create new work or develop something you’d already started—and it was open to all levels. Basically, anyone who could put down the deposit could attend. And there it was: for the first time in more than a year, instead of losing something, I had the chance to get something back.

Sol Cotti

Our group of 13 was a jolly mixed bag that got along almost immediately. We ranged in age from our 20s to 60s, leaned a bit female, and were from all over the country, with a heavy representation from the west. It quickly emerged that most of us had a story about why we were there—beyond the simple fact that we were all writers—and most of those fell squarely in the “life change” category: break-ups, divorces, losses, job changes, moves.

The only space large enough on the ship where we could gather was the deck, so we spent most of our time outside, regardless of the fact that we were so far north in October. We rose early, and after breakfast had a morning lesson followed by writing time, a break for lunch, then another lesson in the afternoon. I remember hanging out on deck after dinner, passing around whiskey someone had brought, or playing games, or just talking in the dark. When we couldn’t take the dropping, frigid temperatures anymore, we’d peel off to bed, sometimes to do a little more writing, sometimes to go straight to sleep before starting anew.

Given the year I’d had, you might think I was hungry to jump into it and welcome the seismic break from my day-to-day reality. Instead, shortly after I got there, I was seized with fright.

Our cramped quarters—six of us in the room where I was sleeping, in bunks barely long enough to contain us—may have had something to do with it. But the bigger hit was how vulnerable I felt about sharing my work or inviting critique. I’d done it in workshops before, but this time I was overwhelmed by the prospect. Everyone seemed better equipped. Everyone seemed game for it; happy to do it, even. But I wasn’t.

Pam, who is a generous and patient and gifted teacher, would start our sessions with points or lessons she wanted to cover. We’d discuss those things, ask questions, listen as she read us examples. Then she’d give us a writing assignment or two, and send us off to work. When we reconvened, it was time to read. Out loud. To the whole group.

She never picked anyone to go and never insisted everyone do it. But she always waited for everyone to get a turn. A person would read, and we gave them feedback for a bit, then she would scan the group. “Who’s next?” she’d ask. The next person would raise their hand. I sat and listened to sports stories, dialogue-heavy pieces, beautifully detailed narratives of outdoor landscapes, essays about complex and personal relationships. It didn’t matter how much I liked these people, my anxiety over sharing grew. Soon, I wasn’t even listening to what they were saying. And on the morning session of our second day, I balked.

“Who’s next?” I stayed silent. She waited. I didn’t raise my hand. “Who’s next?” I could feel the weight of my silence in the air. Eventually, we broke for lunch. But as the meal was winding down, one of the other writers in the group, a middle-aged man who had lost his wife that year, approached me. “Why didn’t you read earlier?” he asked. “It wasn’t good enough,” I said. He looked at me, puzzled. “But isn’t that why we’re here?”

It was a small thing he said, but that kind man made me see that I’d been getting it all wrong. He didn’t try to dissuade me and tell me I was probably better than I thought. He didn’t reassure me and tell me everyone likely felt that way, too. And he didn’t have to tell me what opportunities I was missing if I didn’t join in. We had all left our regular lives and traveled to Maine to pick up the mantle of being students again. We had one goal and it was simple: to get better. All day, I had wondered if it was too soon to have put myself in such a vulnerable situation, whether I was still too fragile, too unsteady for the challenge. Now, I was struck by something else: It didn’t matter.

We spent so much time writing in the cold, my notebook is marked at points with shaky scrawl and whisper-thin ink

I read or participated in some way at every session for the rest of the trip. It was so cold at night the crew handed out bricks they’d heated in a wood-burning stove to put at our feet in those tiny bunks. One night, we spotted constellations in the sky and Pam showed me how to identify Polaris. I went to bed at 9 p.m.; I woke around 5 a.m. We spent so much time writing in the cold, my notebook is marked at points with shaky scrawl and whisper-thin ink. We ate our meals in the open on deck—except for the last day, a sunny one, when we dropped anchor by an island and had a lobster bake on the sand.

At our last lesson, when I knew time was running out, I bit the bullet and read a personal story about losing my dad as part of a dialogue exercise. It was based on an actual conversation I had with a staff member at his nursing home, one of the many painful experiences I had throughout his illness. I was still wrapping my head around it all—how much I’d lived through in that finite stretch of time; how different everything felt on the other side of it. Everyone was quiet when I finished. Until Pam spoke clearly, enthusiastically. “Great,” she said.

When we disembarked, I didn’t know that in six months I’d have a full-time job again, at a magazine I loved. I didn’t know that the following year I’d travel to Japan—where my parents met—or to London. I didn’t know I’d soon get a new nephew. I didn’t know I’d eventually leave publishing for two years only to return to it—to the job I have today.

I just knew that I was off to spend the weekend in Portland before heading back to New York. Back on land, where I could still feel the rhythmic motion of the water, I wondered when I’d get on a boat again. I started to think about what might come next.